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Friday, June 03, 2016

Friday Water Cooler

Do I Really Need to Worry About Hillary’s Emails? Yes. She Will Be Indicted. (informedvote2016.wordpress.com). This is the single most comprehensive explainer you're likely to read on the Hillary e-mail scandal, and one reason it's such a compelling read is that it's written not by a Clinton critic but by a supporter. And yeah, it's hard not to get the impression that Clinton is guilty as fuck of violating 18 U.S. Code § 793. (But before you say "She didn't do anything prior Secretaries didn't do," for heaven's sake do some research. Other Secretaries had private e-mail accounts, but no other Secretary had a private server off-site, in a basement, operating without encryption for months.) Of course, the question of whether (guilty or not) she'll be indicted remains moot. Some say the Justice Dept. is simply waiting for the right timing (whatever that is). A more difficult question, given the facts of the case, might be how DoJ can credibly avoid indicting someone who so obviously compromised national security in such a blatantly negligent fashion. The smoking gun here comes in the fact that foreign actors apparently did intercept some of Clinton's messages early in 2009, before the Secretary began using encryption. (It's breathtaking, to me, that she ran a server, for several months, without a security certificate and without SSL capability. The complete absence of IT/MIS governance here is astonishing.) For more on the smoking gun, see the following:

Again, it's not so much a question of whether Clinton violated the law. She clearly did. (And it's perfectly valid, IMHO, to ask whether Obama himself wasn't negligent in this situation as well.) It's a question of whether, and when, she'll be indicted, and how deep the rabbit hole goes.

The targeting staff in Omaha, for example, had planned so many detonations in and around cities that the civilians’ desire to leave open the option of preserving them was not feasible, Miller wrote. He recalls that then-Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney was among those who were astonished at the number of weapons that had been directed at the general area around Moscow, a figure that targeters surrendered only after Miller demanded to know it.

The civilians’ desire to ensure that Soviet leaders could sense some restraint in a nuclear exchange — preserving the option of a negotiated settlement – was also foreclosed by the scale of the planned devastation. The overkill extended to sending nuclear-armed NATO warplanes to bomb targets “already destroyed by U.S. strategic missiles.”

First you nuke 'em, then you bomb 'em again just to be sure. Of course, to prepare for this we need a $1 trillion nuclear weapons upgrade plan. (But we can't afford to expand Medicare. Too expensive!)